The author of this piece writes: “Telegenic and erudite, Murray is of an English pedigree for which there is seemingly unlimited demand in the US….” and this is very true. Americans often are seduced by many U.K. accents and speech conventions: they come across as “intelligent”, and manage to be exotic, read foreign, yet not inferior-seeming. This is a rare phenomenon in MAGAland, where “America is for Americans”. He’s a murmering echo of another immigrant darling of the right, Ayn Rand; and he has more-or-less morphed into the gay male equivalent of her this last year, a unique kind of figure that only an era like this one could have conceived of and incubated.

The meeting place of self-interest and xenophobia gets a classy veneer as Murray stands in Mar-a-Lago shaking Trump’s hand. He did not recite a sonnet from the Romantics for Cheeto, presumably; but his value is clear for, as permission structures for the disaffected and the privileged go, Murray’s collaboration in the festival of greed and corruption is solid gold.

From the article:

“In his [most recent] book The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason (2022), [Douglas] Murray rails against the political left for ‘cancelling’ revered historical figures. He pleads with readers not to ‘litigate’ a past in which ‘nobody’s ancestors were saints’.

However, Murray doesn’t always extend the same level of generosity to his enemies, who are mostly depicted as operatic caricatures. For instance, Murray claims that Marx found ‘a lot of good to say’ about the Atlantic slave trade. To make his point, he quotes from The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), in which Marx writes that ‘without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country.’

Marx is not defending slavery here but merely pointing out that the US owed much of its economic might to the abhorrent trade in human beings. He is also taking a rhetorical swipe at the French social anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, with whom he corresponded and debated, by mocking his attempts to triangulate questions of political economy. As Marx writes elsewhere in the same passage, ‘For him, M. Proudhon, every economic category has two sides – one good, the other bad…What would M. Proudhon do to save slavery? He would formulate the problem thus: preserve the good side of this economic category, eliminate the bad.’ Murray leaves out this all-important context, perhaps because it undermines the point he is trying to make. That Marx was vehemently opposed to slavery is clear from a letter he famously wrote to US president Abraham Lincoln (history’s most famous abolitionist) in 1864 congratulating him on his re-election and declaring ‘Death to Slavery’.

Is it possible that Murray misunderstood the text he has quoted? Or perhaps hastily cribbed together material that some harried researcher had passed along? These things do happen. But if the stakes are as high as Murray contends—a ‘war on the west’, no less —it seems unwise to fudge the research. Perhaps, as his friend and podcast buddy Jordan Peterson likes to say, Murray should get his own house in order before criticising others. This is especially true if he is going to accuse the left of unduly litigating the past. Murray chafes with resentment at ‘woke’ protesters who tear down statues of dead imperial icons in the UK and US. He pleads with readers to take a more nuanced understanding of the historical figures being targeted for reappraisal. In the case of somebody like Winston Churchill, many of us would concur. And yet Murray is perhaps happy to disregard his own calls for nuance when he wishes to perform a demolition job on a left-wing enemy.

— James Bloodworth, Prospect, 4 Dec 2024